[Gllug] best way to update a single production server?

[Peter Corlett]

On Tue, May 05, 2009 at 10:52:08AM +0100, Khusro Jaleel wrote:
[...]
> I assume, then, that if you have 2 web servers with failover (Xen, LVS,
> firewall, whatever), then if you need to do a little DB storage, let's say
> a simple User Guestbook, etc then it's best to put the DB on another
> server, isn't it, or a NAS, etc? This is assuming a web server that is 99%
> read-only, with only the occasional DB access.

You've pretty much described the classic large web app setup: have a
load-balancer in front of a number of stateless application servers, which
then speak to a database on the back-end. This is reasonably simple and
well-understood.

Scaling involves just adding more application servers, at least until the
database server becomes overloaded. Then the fun starts and you need to do
some serious engineering. However, it does mean that your site is insanely
popular, which is rather a nice problem to have.

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